Featured image: A Panama cross-branded tree frog we found while frogging in a creek on our very last night of group field work in El Valle. Last night at about 10:30 we finished our final field work as a group for the whole semester! It’s surprising how quickly the time has gone, especially in the last few weeks. Since our last stay in Panama City, where we finished up our Spanish classes, we have been out traveling the country again,…
Featured image: Views near my homestay in Sollentuna. How’s Sweden? Still dark. Still cold. But I’m still loving it. It’s already been three months since I flew in from the United States, and time is flying faster than I have ever experienced. Even though I have been here for a while, I still have yet to do any typical touristy things like trying pickled herring and surströmming, or visiting the ABBA museum. Instead, I feel as if I have really…
Featured image: The stunning outside of the Guggenheim museum, designed by Frank Gehry. While there is still plenty to write about Madrid, I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about a weekend trip I recently took to Bilbao. One of the nicest things about studying in Madrid is its centrality within Spain; by design, the capital city is quite literally in the geographic center of the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal), so traveling just about anywhere in Spain…
Featured image: Pier in Gamla Stan, “Old Town,” overlooking the Baltic Sea I just wanted to start off by saying that just because you are pre-med, doesn’t mean you can’t go abroad too! I didn’t even plan on studying abroad, because I was told that it was too difficult to go JYA if I was pre-med, since there were so many requirements. Then towards the middle of the fall semester, I found a program called DIS Stockholm that had a…
Featured Image: [St. Andrew’s Pier, location of the famous Pier Walk that occurs after Church services on Sundays] The hardest part about a trip for me is before the trip even begins. Pre-trip anxiety totally crushes my previously held excitement about a global adventure. As a frequent world traveler, one would expect that the pre-trip anxiety would be quelled over time. However, days before heading out to study abroad in Scotland, it hit me hard. I’ve been to Scotland twice…
As I packed up my suitcase for my semester in Cameroon, I tried to picture what it would be like there. I struggled to imagine what my host family would be like, how the food would taste, or even how I would adjust to a different climate. Now it’s been almost three weeks, and everything here is already starting to feel pretty routine. There are numerous stories I could share in this post, such as the man that tried to…
Well, I’ve made it. The program has officially ended, and pretty soon I’ll be getting to say fa soifua to Samoa. Our papers were turned in and presented, we said goodbye to our families in Lotofaga, and I’ve embarked on a quest for gifts. As I find ways to pack my life back into 23 kilograms of checked baggage, I reflect on the three months that have passed. I start by asking myself how I got here. The night before…
Greetings from Bolivia! I am writing to you from the airport in La Paz, on our way to Cochabamba where we will meet our homestay families and spend the majority of our remaining time. Speaking Spanish has been so rewarding, and I am excited for a new city and a chance to immerse myself with the language in my new home. But first, let me take a few steps back from where I left off – on the train ride…
While we haven’t yet had Thanksgiving (in either the United States or Denmark – more on that in a second), it is now definitely Christmas season here in this little Nordic country. To the Danes, Christmas is almost entirely a secular holiday, called jul, which is where we get the word ‘yuletide’ (juletide), but not pronounced quite the same as in English. Some of the city bars have been decorated with garlands and fake snow for a few weeks now,…
Mālõ lava! Presently, I have no fun excursions to write about. That’s because it’s time for independent research! Yay!!!!!!!!! We have three and a half weeks allotted to conduct research and write a 20-30 page paper about a subject or organization of our choice. I’m doing my research on the Museum of Sāmoa, known in Sāmoan as the Falemata’aga. My paper focuses on the challenges that the Museum of Sāmoa faces in terms of preserving and interpreting tangible and intangible…